


The Dragon's Flute

by dem_hips



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-22
Updated: 2013-01-22
Packaged: 2017-12-12 02:17:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/805998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dem_hips/pseuds/dem_hips
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As the newest addition to Golden Dragon's band of slaves, Sätti finds comfort where he can, especially with his wise yet taciturn mentor Xiāo.  Xiāo teaches him what he needs to know to survive in his new life, but Sätti gets too close, and the Dragon is a jealous master...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dragon's Flute

**Author's Note:**

> These characters sort of started in a weird AU of the universe of The Guardians of Childhood and then things mutated and went horribly wrong. Point is, this can stand on its own.
> 
> Written for a dear friend, who formed Sätti (pronounced "SAY-tee") out of a dream and asked me for more.

The box was dark.  There were airholes, but even those were covered up with heavy cloth, able to breathe air but not light.  Xiāo could not help but watch the dark box with dark eyes, especially when it moved.  Like an egg.  Like a duck’s egg.  At first, there were only minute shudderings, the first quiet signs of life, as the thing inside woke up, explored its dark prison for the first time.  Increasingly, the shudderings transformed into knocking, to muffled shouts in a language Xiāo didn’t understand but recognized from the village they had just passed through.  For hours, the shouts continued.  Knocking turned into pounding, kicking, struggling.  The box tipped on its side.  After a while, it fell still.

The box was not terribly big.  Xiāo could guess the size of the thing inside from its dimensions.  It was smaller than his box had been, even years and years ago, when he still needed to be inside it.  When it was still needed to keep him still.  He rose, unfolding patient limbs with a clatter of chains, and righted the box.  The thing inside shouted again at the motion, the promise of someone who noticed it, someone who could help.  Xiāo did not answer.  When the box tilted over again, he picked it up, just as before.

It only took a day for the shouts and the pounding to cease.  The thing inside must have been hungry already, thirsty and tired already.  A few hours after Xiāo woke up, the thing inside began to sob.

One more hour after that, the thing inside fell silent.

Carefully, Xiāo lifted the black cloth, just enough to uncover a hole, cut ragged and uneven and roughly the width of his thumb.  He pushed a strip of dried meat through.  The thing inside snatched it up, and Xiāo pulled back his finger before it, too, could be mistaken for food.  The cloth fell back over the hole.  With a single spurt of renewed energy, the thing inside gave the box another kick.  It landed on its side.  Patiently, Xiāo picked it up again, but now it would be a day before more food.  A day, and three more hours of sobbing.  Xiāo kept track of the sun by the sundial perched in the back corner of the wagon.

After three more days, the thing inside stopped fighting after its dinner.  On day four, Xiāo lifted the black cloth and pried open the box.

The thing inside was a boy, too young even to be called a young man.  He was curled up in a tangle of already thin limbs, already ragged, sand-colored clothing, already matted blonde hair.  There was a thick knot of dried blood caked into the strands near his temple.  The boy was curled up, and Xiāo couldn’t see his face.  Carefully, gently, even, Xiāo dragged the empty manacles connected, as his were, with a ring on the floor, over the boy’s wrist.  He did not struggle.

Only when he offered the boy another strip of meat did the boy finally look up.  And only after he’d swallowed the offering whole did he pause to look at Xiāo.  Green eyes met black, a grimy, sallow-skinned face attempting to mirror his own perfect, smooth, pale countenance.  Xiāo stayed silent.  He was kept clean, a work of art frequently polished, a flute carefully removed from his invisible box to be played when the master felt the urge.  He was not allowed to be played by anyone else.  The boy said something, words in a language that was harsh and rough, like the hands of his master.  Xiāo shook his head.  He didn’t understand, and wouldn’t--couldn’t--respond.

The boy pointed at his mouth, spoke again, his tone pleading.  Again, Xiāo shook his head.  No more food.  Not yet.  The boy fell silent, his shoulders slumping.

The wagon lurched over a stone in the road.  The boy cried out.  Xiāo did not.  Soon, it was night.

Xiāo counted twenty-six more words said to him before the boy gave up--give or take a few.  The language he spoke was very strange, words slurring into one another, especially as the boy became more and more desperate to be understood.  At least a quarter of the words had been the same, and Xiāo began to recognize it, matching it with a clink of chains.  Every time the boy said it, he slammed his palm against his chest, with increased desperation, even though he winced every time.

Sätti.

The night grew colder the farther north and east they traveled, and soon the boy fell to shivering, curling up in a ball under the paltry, insufficient warmth of the black cloth that had blinded him.  Xiāo slowly, silently stepped over to the boy’s corner and laid with him, and though the arm that wrapped around him was thin and the body that tucked against him was lean and barely clothed, Sätti drew warmth from him.  In the darkness, Xiāo heard the boy whimper with relief, and when he turned to tuck deeper into Xiāo’s embrace, he sprinkled Xiāo’s skin with tears.  He repeated a phrase over and over, which Xiāo took to mean “thank you,” but he didn’t respond.  When Sätti finally stilled, asleep in the comforting warmth of another creature like him, Xiāo tucked his arms just a little bit closer, gracefully ignoring the stink and grime and sweat of the thing that had been inside the box.

The next morning Sätti awoke, shivering, to the cold, early air.  Xiāo was crouched before him, the black pits of his eyes watching intently for signs of wakefulness.  He held out a hand, which Sätti took for no other reason than that it meant human contact.  He fed Sätti another strip of meat, larger this time, and pulled him to his feet.  In the cold and with the weakness of them, Sätti’s knees knocked together--already boney, already thinner--but he stayed upright.

In the middle of their little wagon had been placed a small tub, just big enough for Sätti, and the water steamed.  Sätti’s green eyes filled to the brim with tears, even as Xiāo yanked at his chains to keep him back.  The motion stilled him, a light hand on his shoulder calmed him, and Xiāo’s dark eyes kept him entranced, unmoving, even as he pulled a tiny little curved blade from his waistband.  With careful hands, Xiāo worked the hooked blade through ruined seams, peeling Sätti’s clothing off like dead skin.  Words that protested, embarrassed hands that fought him back, were no match for Xiāo’s superior strength.  Soon he stood shivering and naked before Xiāo, hands striving to cover his most sensitive and private areas, but all the while Xiāo had kept his eyes on the next thread to be cut, and now they were back on Sätti’s face.  He held out a hand again.  Reluctantly, Sätti relinquished half his hold on himself to take it.  Soon, Xiāo was lowering him into the bath.

Sätti hissed at the hot water even as it calmed shivering muscles and raised skin, but he quickly adapted and let himself go, into the tub, just deep enough for sinking.  Xiāo knelt at the edge, his impassive face hovering above Sätti’s.  In his hands appeared a bar of soap smelling faintly of lemongrass, which he dunked into the water and began applying in long, soothing strokes over Sätti’s dirty skin.  The grime of his kidnapping soon melted off into the water surrounding him, clinging to soap bubbles that soon obscured anything beneath the water’s surface.  Much more willing to cooperate, now, Sätti lifted his arms when Xiāo tapped him just above the elbow, raised his feet up out of the water when he made a motion upward.  He squirmed and reddened when Xiāo reached with the soap between his legs, but the pale face and dark eyes betrayed no emotion, no enjoyment, and his hands were clinical in their movements; they lingered long enough to do what they needed to, and not a moment more.  He took advantage of Sätti ducking his burning face beneath the surface of the water to scrub at the matted hair, to disengage scabbed blood, and to clean behind his ears.

When Sätti stepped out of the tub, it was with one hand balanced sturdily in Xiāo’s, and with the other, he took a towel that was offered.  It was small, and rough, but it tied sufficiently around his narrow hips and left him shivering.  With a mute sigh, Xiāo let it go and scrubbed Sätti dry with another, even smaller cloth, and by the time he was done, a halo of yellow curls was already awakening atop the embarrassed head.  With slender, practiced hands, Xiāo replaced the towel quickly with a wrap of fabric, halfway between loincloth and skirt.  Though Sätti was mostly dry, he clutched his arms to himself and shivered.  His chains rattled with the movement.

Xiāo sighed another silent sigh.  When he reached into the pouch by his hip for another bite of food to offer, his own motions were decidedly quieter.  This one Sätti chewed on slowly, savoring the morsel, while Xiāo moved the tub to the back of the wagon and dumped the filthy water off the edge and into the path behind them.  His chains strained against his wrists at the end of their give.  When he sat down against the wall of the wagon, Sätti stepped over to him and curled up against his side.  His skin was cold, but clean.  Xiāo dragged an arm around him and held him while he dozed with fitful murmurings, but he barely moved.

********  
  


The young man with the impassive face was gone when Sätti awoke shivering.  He started, turning this way and that, but the wagon was so small, had so few corners, and Sätti didn’t know what name to call out.  Even the tub was gone.  He strongly considered banging on the back hatch of the wagon, to try to alert the driver that something was wrong, but something in the back of his mind, something that remembered the dark box and the chaos that filled his world before it, knew better, and he remained silent.  When night fell, he shivered, and when the sun rose again he had not slept.

Hunger set in, with no one there to feed him.  It rained on the first night, and Sätti strained against his shackles to dip his head off the back of the wagon to drink in the drops, but all he got for his efforts was a head of wet hair and a shiver and cough that wouldn’t go away.

The rain escalated into a thunderstorm the following morning, but Sätti was used to those.  He wasn’t used to this solitariness, this cold, and his chest and throat hurt from coughing.  Thoughtlessly, he pounded on the locked wooden panel at the back of the wagon, hunger and fear and loneliness overriding common sense.  He kept pounding even as angry voices rose up from the other side in the slick, melodic tones of his captors.  They kept shouting, even as his hands struck the smooth, hard surface and lost the energy to raise up again.  They kept shouting even as he lost his hearing to unconsciousness.

When Sätti woke up again, the world was dark and very, very small.  He recognized the inside of his box as one would recognize the ugly, grinning mug of a bully stalking forward.  The sun rose and set what could have been hundreds of times, while Sätti rocked in his box, sobbing and coughing and shivering.  When it fell onto its side, no one was there to right it.  He lost track of the days and nights; he had only his heartbeat by which to tell time, now, and he felt that growing fainter.

********  
  


Xiāo had only just pulled his hands back from snapping the manacles back on when green eyes opened upon him.  At first, there was no hint of recognition, no hint of true consciousness, but then Xiāo reached forward and slipped a bit of meat into Sätti’s mouth.  With chewing and nutrients, Sätti’s vision cleared, and his heart jumped with relief to find himself free of his box, with Xiāo there.  Xiāo watched with unmatched patience as Sätti cried out in an attempt at happiness and clung to the only part of the older boy he could reach.  Xiāo gently disengaged Sätti’s loose grip from his ankle and pulled the boy up to his feet.  There was the bath again.  The box had been soiled, removed, and Sätti stank, impressively worse than he had upon his initial arrival.  But Xiāo handled him as carefully as ever, slipping off the cloth around his waist and lowering him into the warm water again.  Sätti’s limbs were too weak, this time, to protest his exposure, and he hung limply in the tub, allowing Xiāo to fastidiously do his work.

Xiāo had to lift him from the tub, help him stand as he dried Sätti off, and, carefully balancing the boy against the wall, dress him, but Sätti found enough energy to once more curl up against his side once he was clean and dry and clothed.  Xiāo understood that.  He remembered how nice it used to be to have real human contact.  He found himself, oddly, grateful that by the time Sätti’s cough had gone away and he was aware enough to see clearly again, Xiāo’s bruises had all but disappeared.

The next time someone came for him, Sätti was awake to see the finger beckoning from the back of the wagon.  The man--barely above a servant, nothing important, but with power enough over them--snapped a few words in a language Sätti did not understand, and then stepped back down onto the ground.  They had stopped; a rare occurrence now on their impatient journey back east.  Xiāo gave a slow, comprehending nod and rose; Sätti tugged him down, heart pounding with a sudden dread.  Sätti shook his head insistently, mouth opening up to trembling words, pleading the same few syllables over and over.

The man at the end of the wagon barked something that struck Sätti to the core, though he did not understand it.  Xiāo stood, pulling Sätti up with him by his chains, and dragged the boy back into the depths of the wagon.  Ignoring the rising wail of pleas, Xiāo slipped the chains onto a metal hook by the wooden door, and though Sätti easily could have slipped them back off, Xiāo pointed to the hook and the space on the floor occupied by Sätti’s feet with such insistent jabs and such a stern look on his normally impassive face that Sätti found himself cowed.  With what could almost be construed as panicked fear writhing in those black eyes, Xiāo cupped Sätti’s face with the fingers of one hand and pressed a finger to his lips with the other.  He left the packet of food at his waist in Sätti’s hands and then moved back to the edge of the wagon.  The servant loosed his manacles and took Xiāo away with him.

Obediently, Sätti curled up in the corner of the wagon and waited.  He did not bother to slip the chains from their hook; he did not even devour the food he was given all at once, though he was very hungry.  He had come to associate the meat with the older boy, and he partook only when the loneliness clawed at his insides.

He slept little, and ate frequently.

********  
  


On the morning after his third night alone, a thump alerted Sätti that something was happening.  He felt more than heard it, a sudden, solitary, echoing vibration in the floor that roused him from another attempt at rest.  Green eyes opened to the tune of the clicking of chains, and the servant from all those days ago walking away from the wagon as it began once more to move in the caravan.  The older boy did not stir.

With a cry, Sätti bolted for him, forgetting his movements were limited by the hook, and he fell backwards, wrists smarting.  By the time he got his chains free and scrabbled over to Xiāo’s side, the sting in them hummed through his arms, but Sätti ignored the pain.  The older boy was on his side, and the sleek sheen of black hair allowed to grow from only half his head had fallen over his face like a curtain.  Pushing it back, Sätti found his eyes open only in slits and feared he was unconscious until Xiāo’s lips parted minutely, briefly, silently.  Sätti babbled at him, desperate for further response, but the young man on the floor remained still.  Brightening, Sätti remembered the food left in the pouch, but when he offered Xiāo a morsel, the older boy quickly turned his head and vomited off the back of the wagon.

In the sunlight now, Sätti could see his bruises.

Through his growing horror, he saw they extended up from the waistband of his loincloth along his well-defined ribs, across his bare chest, up his sinewy neck, behind the ear pierced with multiple golden rings and even along his freshly-shaved scalp, into the curtain of hair.  Xiāo’s chest heaved; he spat the remains of vomit as far off down the path as he could, and then he painstakingly rolled back over closer to Sätti.  The younger boy clung to him, as if meaning to pretend that Xiāo was still the stronger one.  His grip on Xiāo was as gentle as the older boy’s had been on him, carefully holding on and lending warmth Xiāo didn’t need; his skin was still hot, even in the cold mountain air.

“Sätti.”  The boy was pressing his hand to his chest again.  “Sätti.”  And then his palm rested ever so lightly on the older boy’s, right over his heartbeat.  There was a question on his face, and in the strange words he murmured.

Xiāo shook his head, and Sätti’s hopeful face fell.  He pressed a little harder; again, Xiāo’s head shook: “no.”  With carefully controlled movements, he pulled his chained arm around Sätti and tugged him closer.  Sätti’s strange, pointed nose dug into a bruise by Xiāo’s shoulder, and Xiāo hated (secretly, just to himself) how his muscles sang with the pain.  He pressed a kiss into Sätti’s hair, and it stuck there in the tangle of curls.  Sätti nuzzled in closer and soon fell asleep.

********  
  


Sätti strengthened alongside Xiāo.  Days later, after a third, less necessary bath that Sätti managed to complete mostly on his own, Xiāo beckoned him to the side of the wagon.  Hair still wet and clinging to his neck, Sätti trundled over and sat by him.  There was a list of colored pictograms on a piece of parchment on his lap, to which Xiāo directed his eyes.  Sätti peered down; the pictures were in neat little rows and ranged from a line of clustered dots representing numbers to deftly drawn miniature animals to heavenly bodies.  Sätti peered down at the parchment with interest, then back up at Xiāo’s face, blinking.

With a neatly trimmed and manicured finger, Xiāo pointed to the tiny picture of a dragon, painted in a rich goldenrod hue, and then pressed three fingers to his own chest.  Sätti blinked, uncomprehending, even when he repeated the gesture, so Xiāo kept a finger by the dragon and pressed one from his other hand to a tiny drawing of a man, and then a sword.  At Sätti’s continued confusion, Xiāo moved his second hand to their chains, and finally recognition gathered in the green of his eyes.  They rose up to Xiāo’s face in a panic, but the older boy was as calm as ever.  Again, with a finger on the dragon, he pressed three from his other hand to his own chest.  Sätti nodded slowly, in vague, wary comprehension.  Xiāo’s hand moved from the dragon to the pictogram next to it, a red, hooded serpent, and the other from his chest to the cluster of three dots, the sun, and then up to Sätti’s own chest.

The boy’s small frame gave a shudder.

Frantic, he pointed at the serpent, and then at the man, the sword.  Xiāo nodded.

With growing unease, Sätti pressed at their chains and looked up at Xiāo with questioning eyes.  The older boy nodded again, and pity sank into his eyes as Sätti clutched at his bare chest in a panic.  He set aside the list of pictograms, and gathered Sätti up in his arms, stroking gently at his curls and wishing he could do something more, to say something, to comfort the younger boy.

Probably, it didn’t matter.  There were no words in his own language that could possibly be sufficient comfort for Sätti’s--their--situation, and likely none in the other boy’s, either.

And he still had an unsavory task to accomplish.

Xiāo’s eyes, when he pulled away, were full of regret, mirroring, on some strange plane of existence, the wet, red-rimmed eyes that looked back at him, begging for some semblance of relief.  Xiāo had none to offer.  He kissed gently at the tears and across Sätti’s porcelain cheeks and up into the boy’s tangy-smelling hair, but that was hardly enough.  That could hardly make up for what Red Serpent meant to do to this poor boy, and even less for what he himself had to do.

He took the boy by the shoulders and met his confusion with the most apologetic expression he could muster.  His fingers slid down to the blocks of pictures: the red snake, and then a beautifully painted theater mask, and then the fingers traveled slowly up to himself again.  Sätti breathed in a quick gasp, shook his head even as Xiāo tilted him back against the floor of the wagon.  He protested with words the older boy dismissed with a wave of his hand, and they stopped when Xiāo’s face transformed into a furious grimace, and he hissed, animalistic, serpentine.  Xiāo pressed a hand to Sätti’s lips and pulled insistently at his chains.  Silence, the hiss demanded. Obedience.  That was what Red Serpent wanted, what he expected.  That was what Xiāo had three days to teach him.

Sätti stilled, and then froze, for Xiāo had tugged down his own loincloth and was stroking himself to attention.  His face dissolved into a blank wall, hard and impossible to read, and Sätti seemed to fall victim to his hypnotizing eyes--so much like the snake!  So mesmerized was he that he missed Xiāo’s reaching for a dish of something slick and oily, missed the way it dribbled through his fingers but panicked when Xiāo reached into Sätti’s slip and began poking--

Sätti screamed, and Xiāo’s clean hand cut it off with a slap that stung and burned red on the younger cheek.  Xiāo yanked the chain again, reminding him: obedience.  Silence.  He’d kill you where you lay if you did that in his presence.

Sätti quieted.  Xiāo pressed in.

The scream reduced to a muffled whimpering that Sätti tried to bite into his lower lip.  He tightened around Xiāo’s finger anyway, muscles reacting to more ingrained habits, refusing, barring his path.  Xiāo’s clean hand slipped from the chains to caress the side of Sätti’s face, thumb wiping away the tears already slipping down from shattered eyes.  Calm.  Xiāo’s face betrayed no emotion, no pain, none of his disgust at and aversion to his own task.  Be calm.  Be obedient.  Be the palette on which he paints his desires for you.  Xiāo had seen too many slaves who had not understood that.  And he had tasted of them, too.  They both had, though Sätti didn’t yet know it.

Sätti’s face turned away from him, squeezing eyes shut against tears, but the muscles relaxed.  Xiāo’s finger slid out, slowly; back in, even slower.  Sätti whimpered with each thrust, and his lip bled lightly where he bit it, but he didn’t cry out anymore.  Even when Xiāo added another slick finger, he merely arched his back, bit harder, and whimpered a little louder.  He was stronger than Xiāo had realized, poor brave little thing.  His left hand slid down to hold Sätti by the shoulder, a warning.

A keening wail rose from his throat before the boy could stop himself, and the muscles once again fought Xiāo’s widening of his fingers.  He gripped harder--Calm...calm!--but no good, Sätti was screaming again.

Briefly, Xiāo considered stopping, trying again tomorrow.  But he only had so much time, and they’d gotten so far already.  He had a feeling Sätti would be harder to catch later if he gave up now.  So he shoved his free hand over the boy’s mouth and fought against him, thrusting, widening.  Sätti bit at his fingers and screamed into his hand and Xiāo ignored him forcibly, concentrating on his work.

He pulled out to prepare the third and final finger--Red Serpent was not as largely endowed as his older brother, but certain things did run in the “family”--when Sätti shoved at him, knocking him off and back into a pile of crates.  He took off, heading for the other side of the wagon--not that any part of it was safe, not really--but Xiāo recovered too quickly, snagging at his chains again.  Sätti fell hard on his rear, shrieking incomprehensible syllables while Xiāo stood over him, frustration taking root in his features.

Just let me do my job.  I don’t want to do this any more than you do.

Xiāo reached up and smeared his bloody hand across his face, hissing wildly, more the Red Serpent than his master’s brother ever was.  Sätti froze, a high keen clinging to his throat, fear writhing across his skin.  His voice hitched when Xiāo added a third finger, turning, twisting, pulling, pushing, widening...yes.  By the look on the boy’s face, he was trying to keep himself relaxed.  Xiāo could have kissed him--but of course, he would save that for later, with this visage removed.  Red Serpent was never one for showing affection.

Carefully, he removed his fingers, and Sätti’s wail faded into intermittent whimpers.  With one hand still clutching at Sätti’s chains--Serpent, now, everything about him must be serpentine, now that he wore the man’s mask--he used the other to work himself back up with quick, masterful strokes.  And that was more than being the Serpent, for Xiāo had a better teacher than he’d turned out to be.

Sätti watched warily from the corners of his eyes as Xiāo poured the glistening liquid and let it dribble down his hard length.  Panic picked up in his chest, but he begged it to get gone, to just let the older boy finish and this would surely all be over...surely...

Xiāo turned his attention back to him, and Sätti tucked his face away again.  He didn’t want to see the way the Red Serpent mask twisted the older boy’s face when he...when he...

To Sätti’s infinite credit, the only sound that came out of his mouth as Xiāo began to push into him was a high-pitched little squeal, rather like a piglet being slaughtered.  Red Serpent would probably like that, Xiāo thought with distaste, rocking his hips to ease himself into Sätti.  With each further centimeter, Sätti squeaked as if little by little, the life were being squeezed out of him.

All the way in, now, Xiāo took Sätti’s hip in his oil-slicked hand, and gripped, and thrusted.  Sätti just clutched at his chains, his eyes drawn and blank, and each thrust only received from him a high noise in a minor key, each one on rhythm and rising along the chord like an obedient doll.

His pace was steady, unrushed.  The Serpent liked to take his time.  (And play with his food, but that was a lesson for another day.)  Just as Xiāo thought the boy would reach notes he couldn’t even hear, he gave one final thrust and released himself into Sätti.  The added pressure dropped the boy into a deeper groan, at least three octaves down.  Thought Xiāo, absently, dreadfully, he would make a skilled flute.

He slid from inside Sätti, both slick fluids aiding his retreat.  The moment Xiāo released the chains, the boy bolted and jumped into the tub, scrubbing himself desperately in the used water.  When Xiāo wandered over a bit later, to clean himself up and to scour the dried blood from his face, Sätti curled up at the other end of the tub and refused to look at him.  Even once the last vestiges of the Serpent were gone from his face, Xiāo could not get the younger boy to let him near.

After Sätti had left the bath to shiver miserably in a far corner, Xiāo faithfully dumped the water out the back of the wagon.  It splashed pink with his blood, and perhaps a little of Sätti’s, too.

The boy shrank from his stares and ran from his grasp the next two days, and though Xiāo knew better, he didn’t have the heart to put the boy through that again.  Instead, he spent his remaining time mourning Sätti.  The boy would probably be dead, soon.

Even when they came for him, that servant from before, who barked the rough orders, Sätti refused to look at him.  Xiāo sat at the back of the wagon and watched with a weeping heart and dry eyes as Sätti had his manacles unhooked from his chains.  It was only at the last possible moment that Sätti turned back to look at him with a panicked expression, but by then there was nothing Xiāo could do.

He wasn’t expecting an unceremonious dump of the boy’s body back into the wagon the next day.  Thoughtlessly, Xiāo scrambled up to check on him, but he had only just ascertained that Sätti was still breathing when there was a snap from off the back edge of the wagon.  Xiāo hissed as the switch slapped a thin welt along his shoulder.  There was a man there, not the usual servant but an actual member of Golden Dragon’s band.  Normal servants were not allowed to carry weapons.

From his place on the floor, Sätti whimpered at the sudden shouting.  He could guess at more than see Xiāo’s lean body standing above him; judging by the way the shadow falling across Sätti’s prone form twitched and by the blood spittle that flecked his bare back, Xiāo was whipped three times more, to the rhythm of the man’s rough, angry shouting.  Sätti understood some of these words, now.  “Bad.”  “Punish.”  “Rue.”

Xiāo fell to his knees beside him as the man with the whip strode away, having done his work.  Sätti pulled himself onto his elbows, and his words were frantic babbles, languages mingling between syllables in a desperate attempt to be understood.  Sätti would never learn his captors’ words for “I’m sorry,” but Xiāo learned Sätti’s, then.

Xiāo fell heavily beside him, not knowing how he would answer even if he could.  Painstakingly, Sätti rose to his knees, ignoring his own bruises, shaking the concussive knocks from his head, and licked at the fresh wounds his teacher had endured for his mistakes.  Xiāo shuddered under his ministrations, but he did not push the younger boy off.  Sätti wept between licks and spoke between sobs, “mir leid, mir leid, mir leid.”  After a while, Xiāo pulled away; Sätti climbed wretchedly into his arms, and they slept, their skins throbbing as one.

********  
  


Xiāo’s finger dragged to a picture of a viridian monkey, and then to the man, and then to the chains, and then pressed his hand against Sätti’s chest, but he bypassed the sword.  Sätti tilted his head to the side in confusion, with his finger on the missed icon, but Xiāo merely shook his head, and pointed to the five, and then the eight.

“...Old?” Sätti murmured, his face creasing with frustration.  He didn’t even know if he had the word’s meaning right--but Xiāo nodded, with a wry little smile.  Green Monkey was the oldest of the brothers.  He rarely fought, anymore.

But that didn’t mean he didn’t receive his due pleasures, even if they were Red Serpent’s refuse.

“How...” Sätti started, painstakingly, but his question was too complicated for his limited understanding.  He took the pictogram chart and scanned it for helpful images, but he still seemed lost.

Xiāo understood, though.  He set the chart aside, just as before, and took Sätti into his arms, kissing along his hairline, little soothing, wordless whispers.  Sätti was less afraid now than he had been the first time, but Xiāo was aware that he should be more.  He still didn’t understand why it was that the boy who had failed to please Red Serpent was still alive in his arms and not run through with the spit and roasted for his master’s dinner; Sätti couldn’t tell him, and Xiāo failed to get a straight answer out of anyone who could.  But the fact remained that this was probably Sätti’s last chance--and grave punishment would be in store for them both if Xiāo couldn’t manage to teach him properly this time.  Luckily, his task was easier.  Green Monkey had grown a soft spot in his old age, if the rumors were anything to go by, and Sätti was willing to learn, now that he knew the consequences of the alternative.

When Xiāo took Sätti by the shoulders and looked him over, this time, his expression was less apologetic and more a warning, and now Sätti knew, intimately, what he meant.

Xiāo pressed three fingers to Sätti’s chest, then down to the picture of the theater mask, and then up to gesture at himself, and Sätti’s confusion only deepened when the fingers then traced their second path: Monkey, mask, Sätti.

“Why--”

Xiāo pressed a finger to the younger boy’s lips, then used it to point at Sätti, and then at his own eyes.

Watch.

The boy nodded, and then Xiāo helped him rise out of his lap and settled onto his own knees.  Sätti leaned carefully against the wagon tarp, his hips shifting a bit uncomfortably as Xiāo took hold of them.

Green Monkey was old, but he had been a warrior, once, and you wouldn’t soon forget that, looking at him.  The man, Sätti would learn, had his vanities.

The cloth sat low on the boy’s narrow hips, and Xiāo started there.  At the very first kiss, he felt Sätti gasp and attempt to back up, but he was already against the tarp, and Xiāo’s grip tightened in a reminder: Play the Monkey, now.

Sätti stilled, and Xiāo finished tracing his line of kisses across the top of his loincloth.  He reached the knot tied tightly at Sätti’s hipbone and dragged his palms up the pale, thin thigh, feeling goosebumps raise beneath his touch.  Some Monkey, Xiāo thought, smiling briefly against Sätti’s skin.  His fingers spidered up to undo the tie, to gently push away the habitually panicked hands that sought to protect himself, and as the fabric slipped to pool about Sätti’s feet, Xiāo continued his exploration downward, into curling tufts of pale hair reminiscent of the halo that played about the boy’s head.  Those narrow hips shook and trembled, the hands strained against his grasp, but Xiāo held fast and continued on seamlessly with his work, leaving delicate kisses all around Sätti’s cock.  The boy wasn’t very large yet, even as he began to harden; he still had growing to do, Xiāo guessed, but maybe the Monkey would like that.  Maybe that was why Sätti had been spared.

Already half-raised by Xiāo’s touches elsewhere, Sätti grew to full size with a single, careful swirl of the older boy’s tongue.  His body shuddered so much, so unaccustomed was he to these touches, that his knees threatened to lock and force him over, but Xiāo pressed him against the side of the wagon to keep him upright.  Taking this boy in his mouth after the Dragon’s massive girth was laughably easy; he just hoped Sätti was able to pay attention to the way he moved, when to lick and when to suck and when to tease.  How he continued doing whatever he was doing whenever Sätti’s body trembled faster, whenever he allowed a high keen to slip past his throat.

As it was, he had little time to demonstrate.  Sätti was still very sensitive (maybe he always would be), and he gave Xiāo little warning, digging his small hands into the lean shoulders below him before releasing with a shudder and a wail that rose and died with his orgasm.  He sank on trembling legs to the floor while Xiāo swallowed and dutifully licked the last of him from his lips.

Sätti became aware that Xiāo was watching him, and aware, too, that his own gaze kept slipping from the black eyes to the way the older boy’s tongue circled, devouring what Sätti had fed him.  He wasn’t so terribly hungry--his portions were greater, now, and came from the front of the wagon in dishes like Xiāo’s did--but he had never seen anyone consume something with such a look of pleasure on his face before.

Did that...  He felt his face burn with the thought: Did he...really taste that good?

Xiāo swallowed a final time and ran his thumb in a few circles over the bone protruding from the inside of Sätti’s ankle as the boy’s breath slowed.  He shifted a little, tugging the cloth back around his waist, for the air was still cold, here, and even the tarp could not keep out the chill.

Xiāo reached for the sheet of images again, but Sätti stopped him, clamping a quick hand over the older boy’s wrist.  The dark eyes looked back up at him expectantly, and Sätti found himself thrilling.

“I!” he insisted, squeezing his small hand. “I can!...?”

Chuckling silently, Xiāo nodded, and rose to his feet.  That certainly was a welcome change from a week ago--and maybe Sätti’s improved attitude would keep him from another whipping.  But that he had yet to see.

Sätti arranged himself carefully, painstakingly, between his feet, worrying over the set of his knees, the grip of his soles on the floor, and Xiāo let him.  Better he get that out of his system now.  His comfort with the act would come with time--or it wouldn’t.  That part was up to Sätti, not him.  He was only here to teach technique.

Xiāo looked down after a moment during which Sätti had not so much as touched him, to find the boy’s eyes inspecting his abdomen.  Granted, it had been a long time since the Dragon had asked for him, and the faint trail of dark below his belly button, as well as the rest of what his master liked to have removed, had grown back to a black path reaching down into the top of his loincloth.

Sätti seemed to find it fascinating.  Of course, with his own body hair so thin and light as to almost be invisible...

The boy’s nose ran up, up, letting the short hairs tickle against his lip in an almost innocent gesture, until he reached Xiāo’s navel and ran his tongue over the pair of rings stuck into the skin there.  Xiāo’s stomach muscles tightened almost involuntarily.  He found himself surprised, watching the little pink tongue moisten his skin and his rings and drag like fine sandpaper across his skin.  All that he had taken out of one quick, basic demonstration...?

As Xiāo watched, Sätti trailed slow kisses down the fringe of hair, fingers fumbling blindly for a knot he was lucky was simple to loosen.  The fabric slipped like a sheet of paper in the wind, catching once on his half-hard cock before fluttering to rest over Sätti’s knees.

The boy nosed into the deeper hair he’d uncovered, breathing him in, rubbing at the skin beneath, leaving kisses--teasing! he was teasing him! he had to be!--around the base of his cock.  Xiāo looked off to the side, over his shoulder, releasing only breaths instead of gasps.

It was the eagerness, Xiāo told himself, the sudden interest in learning in one who had so feared it only a week before, that was getting to him, the euphoria over the idea that maybe he’d succeeded this time, maybe he’d be safe--

He looked down, quickly, at an abrupt noise, for Sätti had attempted to take him in all at once and his throat hadn’t liked that.  Carefully, and because he couldn’t have the boy choking, Xiāo dragged a pair of fingers along Sätti’s jaw, and then threaded all five into his hair.  Gripping him like reins, he nodded for the boy to continue.  Slower.  Only too happy to comply, Sätti nodded and took Xiāo’s length back into his mouth, more gradually this time.

Xiāo watched him, carefully, to know when to give a tug on the boy’s hair to hold him back, or when to push, encouraging him against his limits.  But now as he watched, and guided and directed, Sätti’s eyes rose up to meet his, and held his gaze.  As the boy’s mouth moved, over and over him, working him up, up, up in a carefully silenced whirlwind, Xiāo could not break free of those green eyes.

The Monkey will like that, he tried to joke with himself. Green eyes for the Green Monkey.

But his heart wasn’t in it, and his brain took off soon after, as if to find where the muscle had got to.

Sätti felt the older boy’s hips start to tremble before him, and a thrill ran down his spine that bent just so to let him stare up at his teacher while he worked.  He felt oddly excited, for if he...if he tasted so good, then his teacher must have been absolutely delicious.  He worked harder, faster, ignoring the absent tugs on his hair that warned him to slow down, even as they grew more insistent, strong enough to tear at his scalp, he ignored it, faster, faster--

Something warm and thick hit the back of his throat, and he fell off Xiāo as if he’d been shoved.  He spit up most of the salty liquid and coughed hoarsely at the rest, pounding at his chest to dislodge it.

Xiāo, when he came to his senses, found the boy crouched on his hands and knees, cum dribbling down his lips like spit, his gag reflex still working overtime in a panic.

He knelt by Sätti, rubbing at his back until he stilled, and gathered what remained on his lips on a finger, which the boy dutifully licked off.  The taste was...strange.  Not bad--it was warm, sweet and salty at once with a texture that reminded him a bit of thinned yogurt--but not as mind-bendingly delectable as Xiāo’s face would have led him to believe.

...Maybe that was the point?

Xiāo ran his fingers through the boy’s curls and left a congratulatory kiss by his temple before cleaning them both up with a scrap of cloth.  We’ll work on that, his eyes said as he tugged his loincloth back around his waist.  They had two more days, after all.

Early the third day, the wagon slowed to a stop.  Xiāo turned his face from where it had been buried in Sätti’s curls to look back at the open end of the wagon.  Behind them in the caravan, men were already unloading tents.  He sat up quickly, and Sätti followed suit with slower, sleepier murmurings.  They rose together and stood, as far to the back of the wagon as their chains would allow.  With Xiāo’s arm slung over his thin shoulder and his chin resting beside his neck, Sätti watched a large camp quickly form around a large firepit.  They had been traveling for weeks, but Golden Dragon’s gang was finally back on its expansive home turf.

When a servant came to unhook their chains, Xiāo took his pictogram chart in one hand and Sätti’s wrist in the other and followed obediently where the man led.  Their tent was small, temporary.  It would only be needed until night fell, and Sätti spent his first three evenings with his new master.  After that, as long as it went well, he and Xiāo would join the other boys in their massive tent until their respective masters called upon them again.

By the time the servant came for him, Xiāo was feeling confident that Sätti would hold out at least that long.  His timing had improved in leaps and bounds.  He swallowed beautifully.

********  
  


The boy woke him by climbing into his cot three nights later.  The stars were still out, but the green eyes were bright and animated, despite the shallow cut Xiāo could make out just along his hairline, and he left a kiss with faintly bloodied lips against Xiāo’s collarbone.  “New name!” he babbled excitedly, and then the older boy understood; new names meant you were going to live, just a bit longer.  “New!  ‘Jiāo!’  Same name!”

Xiāo gave a noiseless little snort and shook his head.  In the faint light of the tent’s central lantern, before Sätti’s confused green eyes, the older boy picked up his chart on the floor by the cot.  His finger pointed to a painting of a wooden flute, and then tapped his own chest.  It moved back to the flute, but shook his head when the tip touched Sätti.

“Then...?”

Xiāo smiled.  His finger pointed to the viridian monkey, and then with both hands he pantomimed peeling a banana and eating it.  With his mouth still smiling and full of imagined fruit, he left a light kiss on Sätti’s cheek.  Together they laughed, silently.

********  
  


Every time, Sätti came back with a story.  Green Monkey, evidently, liked to talk, and Sätti’s vocabulary had grown in his months under his new master’s thumb.  Slowly, with increasing comprehension, Sätti would listen to these stories and relay them back to Xiāo at night as they lay wrapped together in the cot, if Xiāo was around.  The stories were, mostly, about the Monkey’s glory days, when he led his own band across plains and into battle with rival gangs--before he had joined up with his three “brothers” and combined their forces into one great company.

Increasingly, as Sätti’s speech improved, Xiāo would consider asking him what exactly had happened with Red Serpent all those months ago.  Increasingly, as Sätti remained longer and longer in the Monkey’s care, it stopped mattering so much.

********  
  


Usually, Sätti came back with injuries.  Green Monkey, true to his name, liked to bite, and if the appellation he’d given Sätti were any indication, he clearly thought the boy delicious.  Sätti acclimated as well as could be expected, but sometimes he would return in tears, and Xiāo would be up half the night soothing him and petting him and tending his wounds lest they become infected.

Golden Dragon called him in less and less frequently, for there were still bands on the move here that needed to be dealt with, still rich bastards passing through his land just begging to be robbed, and he was a busier man than his older brother.  When he did send for Xiāo, he was that much more brutal, as if it make up for lost time.

Sätti’s hands were clumsier and less skilled.  He did his best, but Xiāo spent more and more time in bed with his eyes closed.  Once, when Sätti left for his weekly visit to the Monkey, Xiāo’s skin was burning.

That was the first of only a couple times Sätti came back with a gift.  The ointment he rubbed with trembling fingers over every inch of Xiāo that he could reach, over and over, well into morning.  By the afternoon his temperature had dropped, and he managed a weak smile up at Sätti.  The next time he was called upon by his master, he was well enough to survive.

********  
  


The funeral was brief and to the point, barely a moment of pause in the busy lives of the gang.  Green Monkey wouldn’t have liked to go out like this: quietly, in his sleep.  It was a death of little honor, and that showed on Golden Dragon’s face, hard and impatient for even that briefest of ceremonies to be over.  If he hadn’t been so old, Xiāo expected, they might not have even bothered.  But the Monkey had been his master’s mentor and brother in battle, and if nothing else, that promised at least the tiniest bit of respect.

Xiāo stood off to the side with his fellow boys, and Red Serpent’s new slave.  Closer to the coffin in which the Monkey lay still, Sätti stood with White Phoenix’s hand on his trembling shoulder, claiming what was rightfully his, as the next eldest.  When they turned away from the interring, Xiāo briefly glimpsed silent tears on the boy’s cheeks.  If Sätti were smart enough, and Xiāo thought he was, he’d be weeping not for the passing of his old master but for the gaining of his new one.

********  
  


Xiāo kissed along Sätti’s temple: brief, evenly spaced little breaths.  It was his way of warning Sätti that this was going to hurt.

Xiāo had thought, when the Monkey and he had gotten on so well, that that was the last he’d have to teach Sätti, yet now here they found themselves, back in the tiny little temporary tent, only this time there were chains, and flickering candles, everywhere.  Xiāo had thought his days of this were long over.

He held his hands on Sätti’s shoulders again--that was his way of apologizing, and when the younger boy didn’t answer, Xiāo rose and began to fasten him into place.

A hand stronger than he remembered latched onto the collar before he could clamp it around Sätti’s neck, and Xiāo peered down with an inquisitive little frown.

“No.  I’m not doing this.”

The frown grew deeper.

“I won’t!”  In the flickering darkness, Sätti’s face was set in a panic Xiāo had not seen on him for some time, though now that his words made sense, his fear seemed all the more real and terrible, and harder to wave away.

The older boy rubbed at his forehead with his free hand.  He was pretty sure whatever it was that caused Red Serpent to spare Sätti’s life wouldn’t extend to the Phoenix.  And he wasn’t really excited about the idea of another whipping, either.

“I’ll die!” Sätti whimpered. “I’ll never survive this even twice!”

He turned aside from the hand that attempted to cup his cheek, the hand that meant You’ll learn.  “I don’t want to learn!  I never wanted to do any of this!”  The hand tried to cover up Sätti’s mouth, to frantically muffle his words in case the tentflaps weren’t thick enough, but Sätti bit and clawed at the hand, just as frantic, and panicked besides.  “I just want to go home!  I don’t want to stay here and be a plaything for these awful--” he bit again at Xiāo’s hand “--old--” pulled away, ducked his neck “--hairy--” he kicked, strained against the locks around his wrists and ankles “--smelly men!  And you’re just as awful for making me!”

Shoulders tucking in, as far as they would go, Sätti collapsed; Xiāo caught him, easily, letting the younger boy soak his shoulder with tears.  Sätti rocked and sobbed and clung to his teacher, just as panicked and hurt and scared as he had been when they’d taken him.

“Mir leid, mir leid, Xiāo, you’re only trying to help me, you’re only keeping me safe, my teacher, my friend, tut mir leid,” he babbled desperately, begging to be forgiven.

Xiāo stroked his hair, breathed strong and warm against his skin, calm, calm.  Sätti sank against him, and he tried, he did, but then a limb would strain against those cold, hard metal cuffs, and it would remind him all over again of what his life was about to become.

It took an hour.  Or so.  Xiāo had no way of telling the time, in here, and the candles would have ruined any efforts to, anyway.  He merely counted the strokes he made through Sätti’s hair as seconds, and there were an awful lot of them before the boy finally stilled, gradually, in his arms.

A few minutes, a few more strokes, and a couple kisses at drying tears later, Sätti raised his head and pressed his nose up into the soft skin beneath Xiāo’s chin.  “Tut mir leid,” he repeated miserably, his voice scratchy with his wails and his tears, but Xiāo only shook his head, and pressed his hands to those still-scrawny shoulders, and Sätti nodded.  This time, the collar snapped on with only a minor whimper, which Xiāo knew, with a familiar sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, White Phoenix would appreciate a great deal.

He left Sätti--briefly, with another string of kisses along the line of his hair like an innocent garland of flowers--only to retrieve a candle from the corner of the tent.  It was long and off-white and tapered and lit, and it dripped four times with wax before he returned to the center of the tent.  Sätti tried to look at him but his gaze kept falling onto the candle, and then away, and back again.

His eyes released a tear for every drip of wax, but he stayed still.  Xiāo couldn’t help but give his shoulder one last squeeze, one last apology, before he tilted the taper over the boy’s exposed chest.  Sätti screamed loud enough to wake the dead (as if the Monkey could have helped him), and the hot wax burned, over and over.

********  
  


White Phoenix was only marginally white (more peach-colored, really, and his hair was a dark brown of the Eastern European variety).  He was even less a phoenix.  He had much more in common with a white taper candle than with his namesake.

********  
  


“Rastopka,” Sätti ground out between gritting his teeth and sucking in another breath.  His throat was raw from screaming in White Phoenix’s nest, from the sobbing he’d only allowed himself to do once he’d crashed through the tentflaps to fall at Xiāo’s side, from the gasping and hissing he made as Xiāo applied the proper ointments to his burns.  In addition, his pronunciation was poor, and Xiāo’s Russian was rusty, but he had a good guess what the boy meant.  None of the four brothers had ever been particularly clever with their namings.

Xiāo didn’t have the proper pictogram to explain the word’s meaning, so he ignored it for now and concentrated on soothing Sätti’s wounds.  In a few days, when he was well enough to sit at the slaves’ fire, Xiāo pulled from within the circle of rocks a thin, dry twig that would easily burn once the flames reached it.  He pressed it into Sätti’s hands.  Rastopka.

Kindling.

********  
  


The boy who had been left beside him in bed one night, babbling mindlessly and ruthlessly in his mother tongue, was a Sätti who had degraded.  In the dim lantern light, the other slaves who were not otherwise occupied shifted in their sleep, grumbling for him to shut his mouth.  Xiāo ignored them, turning carefully over to soothe the boy dumped unceremoniously next to him.

Sätti was curled into a miserable little ball, his arms and legs twisting as if to both cover himself and still be covered, but as far as Xiāo could tell, he was unharmed.  The usual wax-induced burn marks over his shoulders and abdomen and legs were conspicuously absent, and the boy flinched when Xiāo tried to touch him, to pull the covers up over him to give him some semblance of protection.  With his lips twisting and a feeling of dread flaring up in the pit of his stomach, he slipped off the cot and circled it, trying to get a good look at the boy’s face.

It was soaked, he found as he knelt, and reddened in blotches, some of which were already fading into bruises.  Eyes pressed firmly shut were still bubbling over with tears, and would not look at him.  Xiāo reached for the burn ointment out of habit, but he still could not tell what was wrong.  His heart ached to see Sätti like this, and that ache was made all the worse for his sudden ineffectiveness.  Without being able to touch the boy, without being able to heal him or understand him or even be seen by him, what could he do?

He took a deep, silent breath.

Leaving aside the medicine, Xiāo took the boy’s head in his hands, gripping harder when he tried to pull away, running his thumbs in gentle circles over his wailing temples.  He pressed his cheek closer to the captured face as if he meant to kiss the tip of Sätti’s ear, and then he murmured.

“What happened?”

Sätti froze mid-wail.

In the other corners of the tent, the other boys grumbled with appeased impatience and turned and tossed until they fell asleep again.  Xiāo smoothed a thumb over Sätti’s worry-lined forehead.  “What happened?” he whispered again, and his voice was like crystalline water, calm, running water, more soothing than a kiss or a hand on his shoulder or the explanation of a word.  His voice was the lightest, coolest touch on a burn wound, the gentlest rub over screaming, raw muscles; the sweet lick of an innocent, apologetic tongue over a fresh lashing.

Sätti cracked open one eye.  Xiāo’s face matched his voice; his genuine worry and concern almost made the boy keen in relief.  But he held himself fast and buried his face into the curve of Xiāo’s neck, and he spent a moment or two breathing deeply, just breathing, of the smell of someone who wasn’t full of fire and spirits and the determined disinterest of the welfare of this small, storm-tossed boy.

Sätti took his time sorting through the words that he knew, transforming them into the right language.  When he did speak, his voice was ruined, broken.

“He didn’t smother the candle first,” he said.

********  
  


“One more thing.  Tell me one more thing,” Sätti murmured up into his neck.  He knew better, after Xiāo had made him swear that one time, over a year ago, to never tell anyone he had spoken.  He knew better, because the Dragon coveted his flute most selfishly, and could sometimes be--when the mood struck him--more ruthless than the Phoenix himself.

(That was why he was the leader.)

Sätti knew better, because he was older now, not such a boy anymore.

But even when Xiāo shook his head, mutely, Sätti struggled up to press a kiss to the bottom of his chin as if he thought he were being charming.  (He was right, silly little thing.)  “Please?”  He lowered his voice even more, not that anyone else was in the tent that night.  “Tell me your name.  Your real one.”

Xiāo turned his face away, but the motion made him feel petulant, or haughty, or both.  Sätti tugged on his arm, gripped his hand, squeezed insistently.  “Please.  I want to know...I want to know you.  Not the Dragon’s xiāo.”

Xiāo huffed out a silent little breath, trying to ignore him, trying to sleep, but Sätti was leaving begging, clever little kisses all along his jaw, and Xiāo could not fight against both him and the desire he’d had, for so, so long, to tell someone, anyone...

He bent his neck down, leaving in Sätti’s hair a light kiss and a word, like a quiet little promise--of what, even Xiāo did not know.

“Seiji,” he whispered, and it felt so awfully liberating, not only to speak, but to wrap his tongue around the beautiful syllables of his home, which had been all but lost.

“Seiji,” repeated Sätti, pacified, feeling the new sounds bound around like a grain of sugar in his mouth. “Sätti.  Seiji.  Almost the same.”

Xiāo smiled in the darkness, and nodded, and retreated back into his permanent silence.

********  
  


Xiāo had been gone for six days.

Normally, that was strange--that was wrong, in a way, because the captains would take their boys for three, or less, at a time.  They would get bored, or their slaves would need time to heal--or a marauding band would come calling unannounced, and their attentions would be taken up with attack.

But Sätti could put the pieces together.  He had been here a long time, now, long enough to know that the tent had been so empty lately because Red Serpent’s boys had left--had been taken away by wagon into the night--and they were not coming back.  The Phoenix hadn’t seemed so worried, had been no more or less ruthless in his handling of Sätti since.

But Xiāo had been gone for six days.  The last two nights, Sätti had the entire tent to himself.

Golden Dragon was furious.

Xiāo didn’t return to their shared cot suffering the indignity of being carried, limp and half-dead.  But he did return alone, halfway through a particularly warm mid-afternoon, favoring one leg heavily and clutching at an arm that looked perhaps a little crooked.  He didn’t scream, or sob; his eyes were dry, if dull, when he sat down on the cot and wordlessly propped up his back against the wall behind them.  Sätti rushed to his side from the other end of the tent, but his usual babbling dried up before it could begin.  Xiāo was covered in shallow cuts that were already healing, bruises that were already yellowing, and his face had grown listless.  His usual spark of...of something--Sätti realized he’d never put a name to that feeling--was gone.

Sätti climbed into his lap and Xiāo pulled his arm around the narrower shoulders and hugged him close, but he still didn’t cry.  He shook, and when Sätti pressed an ear to his chest, the echo of a racing heart thudded in his skull, but Xiāo still didn’t cry.  Only his hands cried, gripping at Sätti’s skin as he would a lifeline.

He was so, so tired.

When in two days the Dragon sent for him again, his shouts furious and fire-breathed and audible even across camp, and Xiāo’s hands were still clinging to him, Sätti clung back.

“No,” he told the servant firmly, even as his entire body began to tremble. “He is still hurt.  Go away.”

Xiāo tried to unclench his hands, to make Sätti do the same, to make him stand down and not be a fool, but he was too weak even to protect the boy--the young man--who had been placed in his charge.

The servant snapped at Sätti, calling him a worthless slave, a filthy whoreboy, a round-eyed devil.  “Golden Dragon demands!  Let go!”

Sätti fought, heart bursting, muscles straining, but the servant was huge, more brawn than brain, and he quickly pried Xiāo from the cot and from Sätti’s grasp.

“No!”

Xiāo went without a fight, but his student, his friend, kept clinging to him, screaming.

“He’s not healthy!  He’s not well!  He’ll kill him!  Stop!”

The servant pulled Sätti, his fingertips still tight around Xiāo’s ankle, to the very edge of the cot before shaking him off with one final tug.  Xiāo watched out of the corner of his empty eyes the yellow halo of curls fall back onto the cot as he was carried off, yet still the young man dashed to his feet, holding out for him, calling.

“Seiji!”

Xiāo stilled.  No one noticed.  The servant carried him off out of the tent, leaving Sätti alone and calling out, his wails dissolving into wordless cries.

********  
  


It was only two hours later that the servant returned.  Xiāo was not with him.  He had come for Sätti.

********  
  


Not since he had first been taken had Sätti come under Golden Dragon’s scrutiny.  He had had underlings to hand Sätti off to servants who had handed him off to lower servants who had placed him in a box in a wagon in Xiāo’s questionably capable hands.  The only other time Sätti had seen him was at Green Monkey’s funeral.

He was tossed to the ground, now, at Golden Dragon’s feet, chains clinking and dust rising to seep into his nostrils.  He fought against coughing and prostrated himself at the Dragon’s feet, shivering at the precipice of the unknown.  The servant who had brought him only laughed when Sätti had demanded to know his fate, but here, now, no one was laughing.

Before he had landed on his knees and pressed his forehead into the dirt, Sätti had seen a ring of people around a fire, the Dragon rising, his face obscured.  Sätti longed to look up, to catch Xiāo’s eye; he must be here, he must be!  But he knew better.  Xiāo had taught him better.  So he stayed still, listened to the crackling of the fire and smelled the cooking of meat and waited for something to happen.

He only waited a few moments.  A pair of thin, wiry fingers had hooked beneath his chin and tilted it up.  Sätti complied.  Golden Dragon was smiling.

“Stand, boy.”

His voice was deep, but when it rose in the flowing tide of his language it hit notes that were high and acidic and burning.  Sätti stood, keeping his head tucked down.  The Dragon took his hand.  He was massive.

“Come sit with me by the fire.”

Sätti sat, on the ground by the Dragon’s smoothly carved stool.  He tried to remain calm, but his hands shook of their own accord.  The man who had attacked his village, kidnapped him, and burned it to the ground, was treating him like a guest--of sorts.  He was still sitting in the dirt, still chained and held captive by that brute who had taken Xiāo away, but here was the feared Golden Dragon, smiling at him, speaking pleasantly to him, with, from what he could tell, his dozens and dozens of slaves and servants and fellow bandits standing around silently watching.

“Have some meat, hm?”

Sätti tilted his head.  Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the Dragon reach in with his hands and pull off a dripping hunk of meat from the animal roasting on the spit over the fire.  He had to look up to take it, but the first thing he saw was an ear.

At first, his brain made no sense of it.  There was an ear in the fire, black and crispy.  There was a human ear, lined with little golden rings.

Sätti took the meat before the Dragon could rush him.

Xiāo had earrings like that.

Sätti took a small nibble.  It reminded him of the scraps Xiāo had fed him when he’d first gotten there.

There was an ear in the fire, black and crispy and lined with little golden rings.  Xiāo had earrings like that.

Sätti stopped chewing.

Xiāo’s ear was in the fire.

Sätti’s eyes widened.

Xiāo’s everything was in the fire.

Not everything.

Sätti’s brain rejected the charred flesh, and it became an indistinct object through blurred vision.  Sätti’s hand rejected the charred flesh, throwing it as far away from himself as he could as if it were a fire ant crawling on his skin.  Sätti’s throat rejected the charred flesh, and it slapped wetly on the ground in front of his knees, so chewed and formless that it could no longer be recognized as belonging to Xiāo, his teacher, his companion, his only friend.

“You dare reject my hospitality, boy?!”

The Dragon’s roar didn’t warn him fast enough.  And anyway what was he supposed to do?  That damn stupid servant had him by the wrists at the ends of heavy chains, and he couldn’t have reached up to block the blow even if he’d thought to.  He landed with a hard knock to his head upon the ground, and when he opened his eyes, little golden lights were spinning around his vision.

“First you ruin my flute and now you ruin my meat?!”

A sharp, swift kick landed in Sätti’s stomach, but he couldn’t curl around it, he couldn’t protect himself, the chains were pulling him back.

Something was dragging him upwards by his wrists.  His head and vision spun, fading in and out of black, but soon he was dangling by his chains, toes barely touching the ground, face to face with the burning eyes of an enraged Golden Dragon.  His black eyes danced with seething fury, his teeth bared in a growl, but Sätti could only glimpse, over his shoulder, Xiāo’s body roasting into distortion, an unrecognizable hunk of crisp blackness.

It took everything Sätti had to keep his stomach still, for he knew if he vomited on the Dragon he would surely be joining his teacher on the spit.  He almost went ahead with it.  Later, he would wish he had.

“Only one thing we can do,” said the Dragon, his breath hot and acrid with the smell of roasted flesh. “You will take his place.”

His voice rose, then, speaking to all those gathered and all those not gathered, a rash, furious challenge.  “I will take White Phoenix’s rastopka and carve it into my new flute.”  His eyes and lips curled into a hideous, twisted grin.

“My new Xiāo.”

Sätti’s eyes fell closed. 


End file.
